It occurred to me today that 2015 is the 20th anniversary of Michael Landy’s Scrapheap Services. I wonder if there will be any events held to celebrate it?
You walk into the exhibition space, you’re kind of struck by the vibe of sterility in there. The walls and flooring are of a shade of white that place you in a nowhere, endless. Lots of little paper cut-out figures all over the floor. Your first instinct is to pocket one of the fuckers – the artist must have known this would be the case – and the gallery staff are watching you very closely. It’s almost like theatre. The video installation starts up, its audio a kind of measured, processed, cleansed language of corporate euphemism. The mannequins are unsettling: humanlike enough to be humanlike, but with limbs at slightly odd angles, like almost-there cyborgs, not space chimps.
„With this work Landy suggests our complicity in sustaining society’s potentially dehumanising processes through hierarchies of valuation: ‚everyone is complicit in the whole thing'“.
It’s a long time since I saw this installation – probably a decade or more. But it’s stuck with me – the humour of it, as well as the sheer fucking beauty of it.